Moved Apart: Communicated Experiences of Separation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

What emotions are evoked in people when a young person moves away from home, a close relative leaves for a journey or emigrates? What emotions are evoked by the social distancing and isolation forced by war or a pandemic?

These questions are the core of our project which studies emotions and separation in East Asia and Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Through three sets of studies, we examine people´s experiences of separation at different stages of life, separation at different times and spaces, and how the experience of separation was communicated through letters.Characteristic of the 16th and 17th centuries was an increase in global mobility that connected the world in new ways.

Mobility increased within East Asia and Europe, but also between the two regions. Historical studies have often focused on the aim of mobility, and on the encounters and connections it led to. Our project reverses this bias: distance in time and space means separation between people. With this new focus, both parts of mobility are made visible – those who moved and those who remained.

Both experienced separation.

This novel approach to globalization allows more attention to the experiences of women, as those who more often remained behind.

The program thus contributes methodologically, theoretically and empirically to various fields in early modern research, and promises a broad impact both within and beyond the global historical field.